


Minds are not Made to be Controlled

by Ladsalt



Category: Homestuck, Original Work
Genre: Abuse, Abusive Relationships, Body Horror, Dissociation, F/M, Hive Mind, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Mental Anguish, Mental Coercion, Mind Control, Mind Manipulation, Mind Meld, Past Abuse, Psychic Abilities, Psychic Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-26
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2020-09-27 00:27:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20398663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladsalt/pseuds/Ladsalt
Summary: For two sweeps Neolle Parcae ran, evaded, took the protection of whoever would give it to her to evade the Psychic with his claws in her pan. Going back would hurt, but surely, eventually she'd run out of places to go. Having been denied the luxury of making her own choices she wonders if she shouldn't choose to to go back to him while it's still a choice.





	Minds are not Made to be Controlled

Minds are not made to be controlled.

Neolle thinks, though it is true, that it means very little. Her room in the temple is underwater most of them are, and except for when she had first met the thing that calls itself Dagney, the only troll interested in speaking to her would only do so above the water. So she has a lot of time to think, a luxury most trolls are not aware they can be denied, which she will not squander again. 

She thinks about the first time since being off planet that she felt Elswor trying to curl back into her mind. He did not used to be able to reach this far. He is stronger now. His mind unfurled into all hers settling in its familiar presence and Neolle remembered how her breath stopped and she felt her hands clench and shake, and then her mind unfocused like eyes seeing double and then she felt him panic. Neolle had the impression of floating above her body, and rather than Elswor’s fear- she felt pleased. If he was going to make her do things better she could be out here than trapped in there with him. He clung to her consciousness, and she could feel the terror lapping into her. Elswor was afraid of the nothingness between her mind and her body and this unfamiliar space she'd thrust them into. She would have imagined what it felt like to feel like you had no control like you'd suddenly been thrust into freefall, she didn't have to. It took a bare few seconds and Elswors lusus pulled him back into his own body. Neolle blinked and her mind focused again and she found she was back in her body too.

It was an interesting thought, even though it meant so little, that her mind would learn to protect itself because it was not made to be controlled. It was a split Neolle knew from what Elswor had planned when he had sent her away. She considered that this meant if she wanted to keep living like this she could manage it.

She could keep running.

She thought about everywhere she had run to. All the ex caretakers and quads, or both, who she hoped were dead. Some she hoped because they had stopped responding to her messages on trollian at all, they didn’t even read them any more. It was easier to believe they were dead, than to think she didn’t mean anything. 

Others she could not pretend had not abandoned her, gone to the fleet to scrub her and their guilt and self pity from their memories. Them, she hated. She hated how she had squandered her freedom making herself smaller and more pitiable and happier so they wouldn’t leave her and they had done it anyway. It made her feel bitter and angry. Elswor would say she was being unfair and selfish of course. 

And she was beginning to think he was right.

Neolle had begun to realize most seadwellers were selfish. Dagney was not a seadweller maybe...in spite of Montro’s best efforts she had seen what Dagney could make herself become, and how she had made a deal with something that was not a troll, and she knew some of why Dagney had done it. She should have just joined the fleet but she wanted her freedom and to be a royal too- selfish, how she had dragged Montro into her cult and the way she had let him follow her and she had put the scars on his skin. Selfish, selfish and vile- violent, like seadwellers were.

Except Montro, she did not know how he had escaped being like the rest of them. Montro held her when she had daymares, and brushed her hair and let her hold him when she cried. When he looked at the occult symbols scarred into his flesh and asked her if she ever felt like her body was not her own, Neolle knew that he understood what this was like too.

A voice that was hers but was sounding more and more like elswor all the time said that the exception to seadweller personalities would prove the rule.

Whatever that meant.

When she thought of Montro she remembered the time Dagney had exploded into angry writhing cracks held together barely by the flesh of its body. Then Montro collided with her grabbing her to his chest as he swam and they shot out of the temple into the open ocean. Hed crawled onto a rocky stretch of coast placing Neolle on a stone just above the water where she curled up wrapping her arms around her legs. She pretended not to hear Montro crying and Montro too pretended he was not wracked with those heaving sobs that she could not forget shaking his massive chest. He held her waist between his massive shaking hands and buried his face in her lap while she cleaned and stitched shut the scars Dagney cut into his back.

If she had been allowed to choose her own quads she thought, she’d pity Montro. 

She was so tired of running.

Elswor turned ten. And paid his way off planet in cash with the combined fortune left to them by his ancestor and hers. Neolle could feel the physical distance between their pans shrinking. He prodded at her mind without delving too deep, all his poking sent little waves of his uncertainty into her pan.

When Elswor reached their planet Neolle waited for him on the rocky coastline miles above Dagney’s temple. Her cult robes dripping wet and trailing into the freezing water of the lifeless tidepools as she stood alone. She had not said goodbye to Montro, Dagney would know where she had gone, Elswor spoke to It often. She knew with absolute certainty that he would worry about her. It felt good, in an awful, selfish, mean kind of way to be the one to abandon someone. The ability to choose, even if it was only to choose wrong, was not something Neolle would have thought she'd miss before shed met Elsie. He would not let her make those kind of choices.

Elswor was a spot of carmine red on the grey beach. He was well dressed, finally. In a modest wool suit and cloak instead of the shoddy shepherds tunic. He smiled at her as he came within a few feet of where she had been waiting all night.

“Dearest,” he intoned, his voice betraying nothing short of utmost sincerity, “Have you had a nice vacation?”

She nodded once, and told herself and the growing lump in her throat and the pain in her eyes that she would not cry.

“Oh darling, would you like a handkerchief?”

Neolle swiped a hand over her cheeks, and Elswor tilted his head with an amused expression.

He held a hand out for her, “ Are you ready to behave?”

“Yes, Elsie,” His hand is hot when she takes it, she thinks she sees him shiver from the coldness of her blood.

This close to her he is stronger than she remembered as he worms his way into her pan. He’s been practicing. She feels her mind begin to double and force her away from her body, She feels his heart racing for a moment, and then she pulls herself back forcing her mind to stay anchored in her pan as he pushes her down. He settles in next to her and she feels the precarious overfull feeling of them sharing her pan.

“Your claws are a mess- split and scrabbled all over the rocks here surely,” Elswor tutted looking over the hand she had given him as he led her back down the beach. Neolle glanced down at him silently as he tutted about getting her nails done, and how long it would take to wash the smell of ocean water out of her hair, “ You’ll make a lovely Fleet Captain when that’s all done though. Don’t you think Dearest?”

It is harder to gather her thoughts with him there, and Neolle speaks haltingly and slow “If... you say so…,”

Elswor gave a self satisfied little chuckle before he answered, “And I do.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you'd like a story about Montro and his horrorterror mate Dagney I have an explicit fic Arm Salad https://archiveofourown.org/works/17906762  
And Neolle and Elswor cameo briefly at the end of Psychidementia a story about Elswor's ancestor https://archiveofourown.org/works/20382820


End file.
